Month: April 2018

The introduction to Stoner lauded it to me as a defense of the humanities, of studying a topic for passion rather than the utility of the thing, something I’m all for and which seems to have been abandoned in our modern society. It says of an interview the author John Williams gave:

he complains about the change away from pure study within the universities, the results of which cannot be predicted, towards a purely utilitarian, problem-solving way of doing things more efficiently, both in the arts and sciences, all of which can be predicated and measured. Then, more specifically, Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text “as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.”

Our hero, William Stoner, was born on a farm in rural Missouri. He doesn’t have any thoughts beyond working on his family farm until someone speaks to his father about the possibility of him going to university in Columbia, Missouri. Stoner, as he is called throughout the book, spends his first year dutifully studying agriculture, vaguely feeling that the information he learns will eventually be useful when he returns to the farm, but feeling no real interest in the topic. During his second year, he takes a mandatory course on English Literature and decides to change his entire program. He doesn’t tell his parents about this change and doesn’t have any idea what to do with this new course of study until one of his professors tells him that he’s going to be a teacher.

Stoner seems so powerless. He falls into his profession by chance. He never once asks himself how he can become like his favorite teacher and only considers the path after it’s suggested to him. The author tells us how passionate he is about literature, but we don’t really get to feel that at all. We find out his dissertation topic, but not why he chose it. It’s a book about being passionate about a subject, about feeling so strongly about it that you abandon everything you know to follow it to see where this new knowledge leads, and yet it lacked passion. Williams is very matter-of-fact as he tells the reader about each stage of Stoner’s development.

It is a dry book, and the contrast between Stoner’s supposed love of literature and the plain, detached narration style was interesting but sometimes worked against the novel. I am not by any means advocating for a pre-broken heart Marianne Dashwood intensity of life, but the level of stoicism displayed by Stoner was off-putting to me. One of his friends describes him as Quixotic, but there was no tilting at windmills and an unfortunate lack of imagination displayed at various points. I never felt like Stoner really wanted anything. We are told he falls in love, we are told he loves literature and loves teaching, but I saw little evidence to prove that. The women in the novel are also rather stereotypical and undeveloped, which detracted from my ability to really like this book as much as others do.

Although Stoner was originally published in 1965, it didn’t sell well in its original printing. Recently, it was translated into other languages and became a huge hit in Europe and eventually found its way back in print in the US thanks to New York Review Books. Although I have mixed feelings about this book, I think perhaps the point is the contrast between how we perceive ourselves and how we appear to the world. To himself, Stoner felt like a Don Quixote, a dreamer in a confusing world, but to outsiders it just appears that he’s caught in the stream, carried along in the choices that seem inevitable. He has an overwhelming passion for literature, is sometimes caught up in the feeling as he leads lectures and seminars. Like his author, as quoted in the introduction, when asked if literature is written to be entertaining, I think he would agree:

Title: Based on a True Story
Author: Delphine de Vigan
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 384
Where to buy: Barnes & Noble

The narrator of Based on a True Story is named Delphine, just like the book’s author. Like the author, she has published a partially biographical novel about her mother and herself. When she attends book signings, she is asked what she will write after this highly successful novel, and she isn’t sure what the answer to that is yet. At a party, she meets someone whom she simply calls L. L. is elegant, the sort of effortless, put-together woman Delphine admires and envies. The relationship that quickly develops between the two reminds the narrator of spontaneous adolescent friendships that haven’t carried over to adulthood. L. will call from just around the corner when she’s available and ask the narrator to join her. They rarely plan in advance, and L. evades meeting the narrator’s children and boyfriend.

One night, they have dinner together. L. asks, out of nowhere, what Delphine is writing now. But the narrator doesn’t have a good answer to that, at least not one that satisfies L. She had been planning to write a novel about a reality show star, one who is simultaneously created and exploited because of the exposure of her life to the public. L. doesn’t think that’s good enough. She says that she saw, from the moment that she met Delphine, that there was another, even more personal novel lurking behind her last one. L. insists that there has to be a literal truth that the author is exposing in writing. Delphine thinks that, no matter what story one tells, it can’t be the literal truth; the author has to cut parts that add nothing to the story and fill in the holes to make an engaging narrative. They have the following exchange:

[L.:] “It’s important that it’s true.”

[Delphine:] “But who claims to know? People, as you say, maybe only need it to ring true. Like a musical note. Anyway, maybe that’s the mystery of writing: it’s true or it isn’t.”

And that is the question that the reader is asking from the beginning. The very title of the book suggests to the reader that this is at least partially based on a true story. How much is true, and how much has been invented?

As her relationship with L. intensifies, other parts of Delphine’s life begin to fall apart. Her children move off to further their education, creating a void in her life. She cannot write even a simple sentence or go near her computer without being physically ill. She receives letters from someone very close to her, either family or a longtime friend, with vague threats and expressing anger over her last book. She loses notebooks full of plans for a new novel, one that L. disapproves of, while travelling with her on crowded public transportation. Throughout, Delphine gives the reader some foreshadowing of where her relationship with L. is heading.

I went into this book knowing nothing about the plot. Someone recommended Nothing Holds Back the Night to me, and, when I put a hold on it at my local library, I discovered this book was available and checked it out. In some ways, it is about female friendship and truth in writing: just how much the reader needs to know about what is truth and what is fiction, and whether that matters at all. It takes a conventional thriller plot and twists it into something more literary. I found certain aspects of the plot to be pretty obvious and some readers might be frustrated by how long it takes for the plot to develop, but I enjoyed this book immensely because of the larger issues discussed by the characters. Delphine de Vigan poses questions about literature and truth that will leave readers thinking about the book long after finishing.